C. Leigh Purtill, the author of both Love, Meg and All About Vee (both of which we absolutely loved!) has just kicked off a bookish experiment that we couldn’t be happier about. Purtill’s novel, All About Vee was not written to be it’s own short novel, Vee was actually just another character in a bigger book entitled Fat Girls in L.A. and it goes without saying that while we did appearances of the other characters throughout All About Vee, the book itself was just what you could assume from the title–All about Veronica May.
But now we get to hear the stories of all of the girls we were introduced to in All About Vee with Purtill’s bookish experiment which will release a part of the sequel, The Rise of Ginny Cooper every Monday in January. Best of all, especially for people who already spend way too much money on books, The Rise of Ginny Cooper is completely free and is available for download exclusively at The Story Siren, a huge website dedicated to young adult books, reviews, author interviews, contests and more.
The Story Siren is also giving you an opportunity to win a signed copy of the first book in the series, All About Vee. From now until January 25th, anyone 13 years of age or older can enter to win the signed copy of the book here.
We’ve reviewed her two books, Love, Meg and All About Vee and now we have the chance to get to know C. Leigh Purtill a little better. We find out more about the books, the original titles and plots before the editor and publishers got a hold of them and even better, we find out more about Purtill herself in this two-part interview with Connie Martinson on Connie Martinson Talks Books.
> Veronica May is a pretty standard teenager. At eighteen years old, she is bubbly, caring and has a few great friends known as ‘The Vees,’ named simply after the first letter in all of their first names. She is a confident actress, star of her school and city theater in her hometown of Chester, Arizona and she is absolutely gorgeous–All 217 pounds of her.
While Veronica loves her life in Chester, she loves the spotlight even more and craves the success that as a big city actor, she knows she could achieve.
Once her father, a widower librarian, decides to finally marry his girlfriend of ten years and the city theater casting a play in which there are no female lead roles, Veronica feels as if she is being replaced not only in her household, but in her whole city. With her father’s reluctance to talk to Veronica about her deceased mother and provide his child with any closure, she decides to make her dream of being a successful actress a reality after finding some old letters that her mother had written her father in the attic. Veronica learns that her mother was also an aspiring actress who left her life in a little city in pursuit of becoming successful in LA–And that is just where Veronica heads to start her big city life.
Veronica drives to LA and stays with one of her childhood friends and fellow Vee and soon learns that life in LA is nothing like she had imagined and that in order to be a successful actress, you don’t merely have to be good at acting. While learning the ropes of this new city and spending her life savings on head shots and a myriad of acting, yoga and movement classes, Veronica realizes that being confident and talented are the least sought after attributes when it comes to being an actress.
Struggling with sending head shots, waiting for call backs and going on cattle calls and auditions, Veronica starts working as a barista and makes friends with two other fellow actors. She loves her job at the coffee shop and her new friends, but her attraction to the manager is also weighing down hard on her path to stardom.
All About Vee is a must-read book for all young teenage girls, in my opinion, for the simple fact that Purtill illustrates how women who aren’t a size 0 are treated not only in LA and not only because they are striving to become actresses, but all across this country. She gives the weight epidemic that plagues so many young girls a story and luckily, Veronica does not change a thing about her weight throughout the book, which I was impressed with.
Through her time in LA, Veronica learns that those who you think are your friends can change and become people you don’t want to associate yourself with, that people can be brutal and backstabbing and to always remember who the people that love you are because those will be the people who want and help you to succeed in life.
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C. Leigh Purtill, the author of both Love, Meg and All About Vee (both of which we absolutely loved!) has just kicked off a bookish experiment that we couldn’t be happier about. Purtill’s novel, All About Vee was not written to be it’s own short novel, Vee was actually just another character in a bigger book entitled Fat Girls in L.A. and it goes without saying that while we did appearances of the other characters throughout All About Vee, the book itself was just what you could assume from the title–All about Veronica May.
